Tuesday, 13 February 2018

The latest in an ongoing series of print-and-play roleplaying and skirmish game floor plans - science fiction themed Kosmoström Set One: Rooms Corridors, Doors & Furniture is now available as a PDF download via DriveThruRPG

Kosmoström Set One (cover)

Kosmoström Sample Layouts:
Some examples of the kinds of floor-plans that can be created with Kosmoström:

Elesa Class Small Trading Station
Cargo Hold A with various goods, Airlock, Storage rooms

History

People often remark on the overall similarity between Planström to the visual language typography of Swedish flat-packed furniture company Ikea - which is an accurate observation the '-ström' are intended to be flat-packed, self-assembly definitions of interior spaces - the reference is an intentional pun.

Further to this, the graphic language of Ikea is an exemplar of a long standing design movement - International Typographical Style (or Swiss style). This style, relying on asymmetry, sans-serif typography and a strong grid structure became the dominant face of modernism, championing clarity and clinical mechanisation in graphic design from the late 1920s onwards, infecting everything from New York Subway graphic standards (1970) to the 1972 Munich Olympics, to, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the layout of TSRs Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977), which, like Ikea and '-ström' share the use of the Futura typeface.

Cutable, open-ended floor plans for roleplaying games were pioneered by Games Workshop, and one of their earliest products were officially licensed Dungeon & Dragons Dungeon Floor Plans (drawn by the architecturally trained Albie Fiore, I believe) which provided the original inspiration for Planström, utilising modern digital distribution and home printing methods to increase availability and adding the innovation of cutter guides to aid in preparation.

Ethos

Both Kosmoström and Planström share the same underlaying design ethos:

universality - usable across multiple genres and

accessibility - low cost of entry, ease of use and visual clarity

flexibility - positioning of elements, scale and scope

modularity - connects with other and expandable

Designed to be customisible with a minimum of effort '-ström'. Heavy black areas and colour is avoided to reduce the environmental and material impact of printing.

Visual Language

As illustrated in the example layouts, Kosmoström is designed to be placed on black board - the full-black negative space representing both unexplored regions (the unknown) and soild walls (the unknowable, boundaries of the known) both of which present barriers to movement and knowledge.

The tones of Rooms are light and open, with Corridors being darker in tone, creating a relationship between light and movement. The lighter the space the greater potential for movement - corridors restrict movement to a linear one-dimensional space, wheras Rooms afford planar two dimensional movement and the black affords zero movement.

Similarly thin lines are used to create a light tone which represents the grid to aid in measuring in movement, whereas increasingly heavier line defines objects and then increasingly resistant doors and then ultimately barriers. Doors then are breaks in the visual space - black lines across the open areas which connect and interrupt motion between the known traversable regions and the unknown.

Kosmoström design references
Universality in science fiction context is a slightly more complex set of vectors than in pseudo-medieval fantasy. The potential approaches to materials, construction and in an imagined future is a much broader and speculative field than the underground construction of an imagined past - which be it the fossilised interior of a dragon, a mesoamerican temple or a castle, these can inevitably be most readily expressed as drawings of aged stone.

Kosmoström then must necessarily narrow down the infinite options of the future and present a specific design sensibility. The initial inspiration is to move towards a generic, hard science fiction as a more objective univerality than genres such as the rockets and rayguns of sword and planet, or the skulls and chainswords of gothic science-fiction or the gangways and cubicles of planet sized mega-cities. This aesthetic then is grounded by developments in aero-space technologies at the height of the space race of the 1960s and informed by both the sleek white functionalist minimalism of utopian science fiction, and the slightly more aged and granular look of late 1970s space opera.

Particularly of note are the signage arrows. These are set in Microgramma / Eurostyle Bold Extended - a typeface often used in science fiction and engineering contexts from the interface of the interface of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001 to the corporate identity of the Jupiter Mining Corp in Red Dwarf. These signs are intended to be placeholders or codes, but have references to vintage computing, hip-hop and graffiti pioneers TAKI 183 | VHS 80 | RZA 69 | KRS 1 | RS 232 | CBM 64 an inclusion of the subversive vernacular, without which the aesthetic wouldn't quite be complete.

Saturday, 13 January 2018

Sunday, 3 December 2017

As we're coming to the close of the year, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the great batreps that people have been doing throughout 2017, perhaps bring some attention to some hidden gems and shine a light on the massive tabletop creativity that abounds in the old school scene.

This works something like this:

1. Nominate a great battle-report. 1.1 Must be relevant to Oldhammer in some way, be it old-school rules, miniatures or whathaveyou. 1.2 Must be published (not necessarily played) this year - 2017.1.3 Must be publicly accessible on a blog or a forum or wherever for people to look at.1.4 It can be your own, someone else's.1.5 Just add a link to this thread on the Oldhammer forum, by 20th December 2017.2. Vote for the best - I'll compile a poll of all the nominations around 21st of December3. Win the winner then has the honour of sticking the 'the Greatest Battlereport 2017' graphic on their blog or just basking in the glory of well earned adoration.

Let the well documented, entertainingly written and presented battle commence!